The Year Of The Sea

[corvi]

In April 2018, we moved to Salt Spring Island. I work on Vancouver Island, so starting in April, every weekday I get up, drive down the mountain, drive along the shore to the ferry, take the boat to work, work, take the boat home, and then drive along the shore and up the mountain home.

I used to see the ocean maybe twice a year on camping trips, but 2018 was the Year of the Sea. It was like suddenly the world had a second sky. Another endless unfathomable vastness you were always aware of. We watched boats cross the trackless blue out the bedroom windows while falling asleep, and the sea began showing up in my dreams. I saw orcas, seals, herons, cormorants, porpoises, and swans on the way to work. I read the poetry of John Masefield unironically.

Starting on my birthday (early summer) I wrote down every day what colour the sea was and a couple words describing the mood of the sea. Here are the colours of the sea each day:



Blue in summer, green in fall, grey in winter. And orange one particularly weird day. Not sure what happened there. Typo? I forgot which color mapping i was using? Sunrise?

In some alternate universe where I have a gajillion dollars, I would commission someone to knit a year's worth of sea colours into a scarf so I could wear the oceans of home around my shoulders when I need to leave the island.

Here are the words I used when jotting down a description of the ocean's mood each morning. The more often I repeated a word, the larger it appears:



(Word cloud image generated with this site.)

Apparently on average I think the ocean is "Restless Glass", which seems reasonable, though I never actually used those words together.

And one photo of the sea for each month of the sea-year:

April:


May:


June:


July:


August:


September:


October:


November:


December:


And me, enjoying the year of the sea:


And now if someone asks me to tell them of the waters of my homeworld, I am set.

Comments

[maribou]

Beautiful.

[corvi]

You grew up on an island, right? Did you have the same experience of the inescapable and lovely presence of the sea?

[maribou]

yes-ish? i mean, for me what's more notable - yearningly, near-constantly notable - is the absence of the sea that I feel when not near it (or one of them? but to me they are all one, really), because i was born into the other. so it didn't feel inescapable, but rather just how things are supposed to be. we didn't always see it - the island where I grew up is not *quite* that small, holding about 130,000 people quite comfortably - but the air smells different when you are never more than 5 minutes drive from ocean, and it was always just around a bend or at the top of a hill even if one wasn't seeing it just that second. totally, utterly present - but never "inescapable" any more than I would feel that oxygen is.

lovely it certainly was, and is, and will always be.

mother ocean has been one of my goddesses since before I knew a word for God.

[maribou]

what you said about it being as if there is a second sky resonates very deeply with me.

[juli]

I am put in mind of the old name of Haida Gwaii, which means islands where the worlds meet or at the edge of the world or some such, i.e. where sea and sky (and land) come together.